Dr Teja Pusapati’s research investigates the diverse ways in which the periodical press shaped Victorian print culture. The early 1800s witnessed an unprecedented proliferation of periodicals, which reached a far wider audience than books. Teja’s D.Phil thesis, ‘Model Presswomen: “High-Minded” Female Journalism in the Mid-Victorian Era’, elucidated how a few exceptional Victorian women broke into the male dominated avenues of political journalism, setting examples for other women aspiring to become professional journalists.
Teja is currently revising her thesis for publication and has also started work on a new research project on trans-colonial journalism in nineteenth-century England, ‘Britannia’s Monthlies: The Rise of Slow-Paced Journals of Empire in the Age of Newspapers.’ This study will offer the first in-depth account of the rise of a specialized line of trans-imperial metropolitan monthlies. More recently, she has become interested in the history of science, particularly in the figure of the medical woman in the long nineteenth century. Her book chapter, ‘Claiming Medicine as a Profession for Women: The English Woman’s Journal’s Campaign for Female Doctors’, which is to be published in the forthcoming Edinburgh History of Women's Print Media, examines the feminist monthly, English Woman’s Journal, as the site of a concerted campaign for the professionalisation of women’s medical training and practice.
Teja has a B.A. (Honours), M.A. and M.Phil in English from the University of Delhi and a D.Phil in English from the University of Oxford. She has taught English honours to undergraduate students at Lady Shri Ram College for Women and Gargi College. She is an ‘Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy’ in the U.K. Before joining SNU, Teja was a Women in the Humanities Fellow at the University of Oxford and an Andrew Mellon Fellow at the Huntington Library in California. She has also been awarded a Curran Fellowship from the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals (RSVP) towards her research on Victorian imperial periodicals.